


Echoes in the Mind

by Butterfly_Beat



Series: Auction Fic 2014 [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-15 09:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfly_Beat/pseuds/Butterfly_Beat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a third of his life, Derek Hale didn't dream.</p><p>When the dreams finally did return, they weren't precisely his...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes in the Mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elegantlydisastrous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantlydisastrous/gifts).



> Written for this winter's Sterek Campaign Auction. My bidder asked for Sterek Porn-with-Plot and "Nightmares" (this ended up slightly less porny than I'd planned, apologies!). I owe her many, many thanks for her patience and understanding this winter - due to the window for writing, I was mid-project when 3B started airing, and I proceeded to suffer a creative schism (I also had a baby three days before 3B went live, which added to the chaos).
> 
> I solved the problem by deciding that my bidder would be getting double her money's worth - one fic in compliance with 3B (to date) and one that goes AU after 3x12 (which will have a higher rating, I promise). This is the first, and shorter, of the two - canon compliant through 3x22.
> 
> Thanks to [RussianMango](http://archiveofourown.org/users/russianmango/pseuds/russianmango) and [Lady](http://ladyholder.wordpress.com)[Holder](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladyholder/profile) for their help as a drive-by betae!

For a third of his life, Derek Hale didn’t dream.

On a purely biological level, he knew that he entered REM sleep like every other werewolf and human on the planet. He’d been assured that nobody survived for long without doing so. But in the years after the fire, whatever dreams he might have had never lingered when he woke. It was a way of repressing trauma until he could deal with it, that’s what his therapist said. Laura had bullied him into seeing one, concerned when he refused to move on even years after they’d settled again. He never quite believed the woman, but that might have been because he’d already spent three years tasting ash and smoke before they met. To his mind, fear was a much more powerful motivator than self-preservation.

The ghost of his mother changed everything. She was just enough balm to his spirit to let the doors in his mind open again, nightmares and fantasies alike. He didn’t realize at the time that those doors weren’t entirely metaphorical, or that they might swing freely in both directions. He never expected that the dreams he walked would rarely be his own.

In the new dreams, Stiles rants and raves and slowly grows quiet. Anger and fear turn to desperation, until the boy vanishes and Derek is left with a desperate need to find him and an endless maze of hallways in which to do so. It takes too long, far too long, for a meaning to become clear. Days and weeks bleed by before he realizes that the dreams were never his, that the boy who runs with wolves has managed to dig himself deeper than any of them know.

It’s habit to downplay the kid’s presence, the weight he carries within Scott’s little pack and the power lurking underneath that fragile teenaged surface. It’s better for everyone if they don’t understand the impact Stiles has on Derek himself, because nothing good will come of it. Certain complications are never worth the risk. 

Ten years later, Derek still wakes in the night with visions of a shrinking padded cell ringing through his mind, cries that echo with the terrified desperation of sanity amongst madness. Just as often, the dreams are the same nightmare through a mirror. Derek sees a Stiles with dead eyes and the sick kind of smile Peter wore on his worst days, with wounds that appear and disappear in the blink of an eye as they paint the walls of his loft with blood.

Derek no longer owns the loft, hasn’t lived there in years, but on those mornings he parks himself in front of the biggest window in the house and sips coffee until the sun comes up. Stiles always finds him just after daybreak, sleep-warm and soft circles under brown eyes that speak to his own restlessness. This is where the routine varies.

On the slow, decadent days, Stiles sinks down between Derek’s knees and teases him into hardness and then out of the mess his thoughts have inevitably become mired in. It’s lazy and frustrating, and by the time he lets Derek come there’s room for nothing except breathless pleas.

Then there are the tense, jittery days - where Stiles loses ten years in the blink of an eye, over-stressed and under-medicated in spirit if not in blood chemistry. Those days, Derek takes the lead and exercises the control he wishes he’d known in his twenties. Stiles writhes and bucks, desperate to know that he’s not alone as Derek presses him down into the cushions of the soft green sofa.

Derek is familiar with the need to fight the intangible demons, to lash out and make contact no matter where your fist lands, and sunrise is one of the few times that Stiles is all too happy to succumb to the silence Derek wears like a shield amongst outsiders. These are the days where he fucks the fight out of Stiles, consent spoken even as the slighter man struggles until everything drains away in a post-orgasm haze that leaves them both quietly outside of themselves.

Lastly is the heart of winter, frost and mist-covered mornings cold and damp enough to be mistaken for six hundred miles to the North. Half of the time, neither of them makes it to orgasm. It’s about closeness and shared warmth, the kind which has nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the spirit.

It’s been more than a decade of facing down the things that find the Nemeton to be an irresistible lure, battles fought both side by side and alone in the night. The Nogitsune is far from the nastiest creature to make itself known. It is, however, a beast that crouches the corners of Derek’s mind - taking up residence beside Kate and the twisted reminder his uncle became of just how far their kind of fall. The fox spirit had stripped his free agency, warped his world until he had almost committed an unforgivable act, and what it had taken from Stiles…

Derek will never know how much of that time Stiles remembers. Some days, he claims total ignorance, and Derek wishes desperately that he could be believed. But Derek knows the darkness that lurks behind the casual asshole his lover pretends to be, has seen it since the Nemeton cracked open the souls of three teenagers in exchange for those they loved most in the world. It took him years to figure out the extent of it, an unconscious link forged out of desperation and destruction that brought haunting dreams and soothing comfort by turns.

But on the good mornings, the ones where they wake curled together in bed and stay there until the mist has burned off the lake, Derek knows that the whole mess has been worth it. They know who they are, now, and the wards burned into their skin ensure that they always will. What they are, well, that’s both very simple and very complicated. They are together. They are apart. And they are everything that echoes between the two.


End file.
